Mr. James > Recent Status Updates

He was in danger of becoming one of those strange human beings one meets in such large numbers in our callous world: human beings who are regarded with horror by men full of life and passion, to whom they seem to be walking coffins with a corpse where their hearts should be. -- N.G.

The painter did not know how to disillusion them, seeing that they were so pleased with being deluded. -- N.G.

"You see, I don't want anything that might suggest she is about to go to a ball or some fashionable party or something of that sort... Our balls, you know, have such a devastating effect on the spirit; so demanding, I mean... They destroy all the remains of our feelings... What I want is simplicity, as much simplicity as possible." -- N.G.

He had divested himself of the little cloaked godlet and his other amulets in a place where they would not be found in his lifetime and he'd taken for talisman the simple human heart within him. -- C.M.

He lay in his chrysalis of gloom and made no sound, share by share sharing his pain with those who lay in their blood by the highwayside or in the floors of glass strewn taverns or manacled in jail. -- C.M.

Mr Suttree it is our understanding... you betook yourself to various low places within the shire... and [spent]... years in the company of thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, ..., curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, ..., tosspots, sots and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes, and other assorted and felonious debauchees. I was drunk, cried Suttree. -- C.M.

Someone was tugging at Suttree's sleeve. A small nun with a bitten face, a smell of scorched black muslin and her dead breasts brailed up in the knitted vest she wore. She tugged with little soricine claws at the bones in his elbow. -- C.M.

Another door closed, door closed, door closed softly in his skull. Light bloomed rose, lime green. He was going out by a long tunnel attended by fading voices and a grainy humming sound and going faster and past gray images that clicked apart in jagged puzzle pieces. -- C.M.

Her hair lay about her head in greasy black clots as if she were besieged with leeches and her eye was bright and inflamed and swiveled up silently to see him. She crossed her arms and held her shoulders and her breath smoked in the cold. -- C.M.

Hitting Rufus: When an impoverished small town can't stand the man in charge, even a hitman can take a charity case.

He felt himself being drawn into modes for which he had neither aptitude nor will. They were both watching him. The tears were gone. Their eyes seemed filled with expectation and he'd nothing to give. He'd come to take. -- C.M.

A room where the mad sat at their work. [...] He'd never been among the certified and he was surprised to find them invested with a strange authority, like folk who'd had to do with death some way and had come back, something about them of survivors in a realm that all must reckon with soon or late. -- C.M.

In the madhouse the walls reek with the odors of filth and terminal ills they've soaked up these hundred years. Stains from the rusted plumbing, the ordure slung by irate imbeciles. All this seeps back constantly above the smell of germicidal cleaning fluids. -- C.M.

The Wallet: A grandfather’s hand on his grandson’s forehead; the boy looks up. The old man lowers his hand to the boy’s nose, extending his index and middle finger. A gesture superimposed onto a round face resembles what the old man fears most: a clock.

"But why do you want her?" Kino urged. "Because she makes me laugh," Jiya said. "It is she who made me forget the big wave. For me -- she is life." -- P.S.B.

She had knelt beside him and nibbled at his ear. Her soft breast against his arm. Why then this loneliness? -- C.M.

He surveyed the face in the mirror, letting the jaw go slack, eyes vacant. How would he look in death? For there were days this man so wanted for some end to things that he'd have taken up his membership among the dead, all souls that ever were, eyes bound with night. -- C.M.

Her ablutions were endless. In her bright metal haircurlers she looked like the subject of bizarre experiments upon the human brain. And she was growing fatter. She said: How'd you like to live in a whorehouse? You'd eat too. -- C.M.

"Until now you could not cry because you were not fully alive. You had been hurt too much. But today you are beginning to live, and so your tears flow. It is good for you. Let your tears come and do not stop them." -- P.S.B.

He had been shot through the head with a .32 caliber pistol and he was twenty-one years old forever. -- C.M.

He crossed the cold buckled linoleum with puckered feet and stood naked by the window and watched the Monday morning traffic in the streets below. A different slant on life here. Old whiskey bottles with their bleached labels lying on the wet tar of the rooftops. A glass skylight covered with chickenwire. The cold winter rain failing everywhere over the city. -- C.M.

Suttree gradually going awash in the sheer outrageous sentience of her. Their glasses clicked on the tabletop. Her hot spiced tongue fat in his mouth and her hands all over him like the very witch of fuck. -- C.M.

"Yes, he will be happy someday," his father said, "for life is always stronger than death." -- P.S.B.

“Do you mean the ocean and the volcano cannot hurt us if we are not afraid?” Kino asked. “No,” his father replied. “I did not say that. Ocean is there and volcano is there. [...] [The] ocean may rise into storm and volcano may burst into flame. We must accept this fact, but without fear. We must say, ‘Someday I shall die, and does it matter whether it is by ocean or volcano, or whether I grow old and weak?'” - P.S.B.

Jiya lived in the last house [...] toward the ocean, and his house did not have have a window toward the sea either. "Why not?" Kino asked him. "The sea is beautiful." "The sea is our enemy," Jiya replied. "How can you say that?" Kino asked. "Your father catches fish from the sea and sells them and that is how you live." Jiya only shook his head. "The sea is our enemy," he repeated. "We all know it." -- P.S.B.

How the snow fell cherry red in the soft neon flush of the beersign like the slow dropping of blood. [...] Blind Richard sits with his wife. The junkman drunk, his mouth working mutely and his neck awry like a hanged man's. A young homosexual alone in the corner crying. Suttree among others, sad children of the fates whose home is the world, all gathered here a little while to forestall the going there. -- C.M.

Curious the small and lesser fates that join to lead a man to this. The thousand brawls and stoven jaws, the clubbings and the broken bottles and the little knives that come from nowhere. For him perhaps it all was done in silence, or how would it sound, the shot that fired the bullet that lay already in his brain? These small enigmas of time and space and death. -- C.M.

When I die he's goin to come to sleep with me. We're to be buried together. It's done arranged. It is. [...] What if the dog dies first? What? I said what if the dog dies first? [...] I mean if the dog dies first are they going to put you to sleep? Why hell no that's crazy. I guess maybe you could just have him frozen. [...] The old man hugged the crazy looking thing to him. Of course I could, he said. -- C.M

We're all right, said Suttree. We're all fucked, said the ragman. [...] He sat with his back to a tree and watched the storm move on over the city. Am I a monster, are there monsters in me? -- C.M.

They squatted on their haunches side by side like buzzards and smiled around. Suttree looked at them. He looked at one and then he looked at the other. They were alike to the crooks in their stained brown teeth. The creases about their eyes, the quilting of their dry bird necks. They squatted there and bobbed their heads and smiled and spat at the fire and said howdy howdy. -- C.M.